


Seven Letters

by telm_393



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Ableism, Disability, Gender Dysphoria, Genderfluid Character, Internalized Transphobia, Neurodiversity, Other, Self-Hatred, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 03:31:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermann/Hermine Gottlieb grows up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven Letters

**Author's Note:**

> Oh please don't hate me for this, I wrote this fic in just a few days because I was having a lot of gender feelings and I am one of those people who likes giving certain traits that apply to herself (like being non-binary) to fictional characters, and I'd just like to include a disclaimer that Hermann/Hermine's experiences in this fic are purely his/her own and thus not going to speak to the reality of all or even most of the experiences of trans* people.
> 
> Please tell me if I've done something seriously wrong/hurtful here!
> 
> Also, this is a fill for the "coming out (of the closet)" square on my trope_bingo. :D

Karla isn’t home, so Hermann is in his big sister’s room, trying on her clothing because today his serious red and brown sweaters feel like they’re going to suffocate him, and he wants to feel the soft fabric of skirts fall around his legs.

He looked it up, and the female version of his name is _Hermine,_ and he thinks it’s lovely. He thinks it’s perfect. _She_ thinks it’s perfect.

It’s close enough to her boy name, it’s even seven letters like Hermann is, but it’s different enough that when she thinks it on her girl days, the fact that her body’s all wrong doesn’t hurt as much.

Karla is taller than her, but her clothes don’t _not_ fit Hermine, and she thinks that that’s enough. She thinks that at the very least, when she puts on Karla’s skirt and one of her dark pink sweaters, she looks like a girl, despite her haircut, and it makes her happy. Hermine isn’t often happy.

She smooths back her hair, plays with it, and if she plays with it enough she’s able to make it look almost like it’s the kind of stylish, short haircut that some girls at school have.

At night she will lie in bed in her pajamas, which are made for boys which makes sense because she is a boy, and she will think that there is something very wrong with her, that her body is supposed to always feel correct, but right now she’s dressed like she’s supposed to and she can ignore that not all of her parts are right, and she feels _pretty._

+

Hermann wants to be a pilot because to him there seems to be nothing more intoxicatingly unrestricted than flight, nothing that operates with the same kind of gorgeous mathematics.

Hermine climbs out onto the roof of her house and watches the sky intently for planes, for those dots of light moving among the stars.

He worships pilots because they have a kind of freedom that he craves, the kind that will allow him to leave his earthly body behind and become something of the cosmos.

He is an ungainly thing, and his gender forever torments him, changing from day to day or even hour to hour and never allowing him to be free enough to say his true name, but one day he will fly and when he does, _Hermann_ and _Hermine,_ they will be simply facts, they will not torment the pilot, they will be who the pilot is and it will all be alright.

+

Hermann gets his hair cut like Alan Turing because he’s going to make brilliant discoveries like Turing did one day, and people will take him seriously when they see that he _wants_ to be taken seriously, wants it so much that he’s gotten the haircut of a brilliant man, and he knows that he will regret it when he has his next girl day, but having girl days and boy days—it’s a childish thing, anyway. It’s not legitimate.

Hermann is a boy, he reminds himself.

He flushes in shame when he thinks of all those days and nights spent in front of Karla’s mirror trying on her dresses and skirts. He shouldn’t like wearing dresses, not ever. He doesn’t understand why he would anyway, even if he was a girl in some wild fanciful alternate universe. They’re not very practical. He bets they get caught on all sorts of things when people just wear them day to day.

He bets that girl scientists and mathematicians, _smart_ girls, he bets they don’t wear dresses or skirts.

(This isn’t true and he knows it, and some days he watches women pass him by, brilliant women who scrawl equations into notebook after notebook like he does, and he wants to cry because he’s a she today and she doesn’t think she’ll ever stop liking dresses.)

+

Hermine thinks that her father would be so disappointed if he knew that she wasn’t a boy.

She thinks that he’d be utterly disgusted if he knew that she’s not even a girl either, not really. She’s somewhere in between, a girl thing boy thing, and it’s disgusting and wrong and she should be terribly ashamed of herself for thinking that it’s okay at all, _ever_ , to call herself Hermine, even in her head.

She’s twelve years old and she’s trying her best to get by, but she hears her father’s colleagues call her an idiot savant, knows that they think she’s a freak, and she looks at her face in the mirror and sees her hair has gotten longer, has gone soft around her face and frames it almost in that way that she liked when she was little because she could pretend it was a girl’s haircut, and she cuts her hair viciously until it’s like it’s supposed to be.

It’s her Alan Turing haircut but uglier, she thinks, than the kind that the barber gave her, and she feels viciously satisfied with herself, with her split ends and unevenness.

She deserves the ugliness, because she is a freak.

She shouldn’t want to be pretty.

Prettiness is for girls.

He’s not a girl.

Not ever.

Not ever, ever, ever.

+

Hermann stands at his chalkboard, fourteen and not so much fearless as simply beyond caring, utterly wrapped up in his equations. He explains the mathematics on the board to the others in the class, doesn’t note their facial expressions because he doesn’t understand those anyway and thus doesn’t care about them, because he’s a genius and anything he doesn’t understand is something he shouldn’t have to understand, and every single number written in white chalk feels like it’s spilling from his soul through his hand onto the board.

Numbers are as close as people can get to God, he thinks.

Numbers are his salvation, when he lies awake at night wondering if tomorrow he will want to unzip himself from his body, which always gives him pause but on some days is near unbearable. They are his salvation when he thinks about the toy planes he played with as a child, his old dreams of twisting through the air, mathematics in motion, because he will never be a pilot—a child’s dream—but he will at the very least always have his numbers, which are close enough, yes, certainly close enough to flight. They are his salvation when he thinks of how he must be some kind of sinner for God to have made him this way, to have mixed all the parts that are _him_ with parts that are _her_ and made them the _same,_ because he knows that God wouldn’t have made him so proficient in His language if he was truly bad.

+

Hermann is fifteen years old when he learns what it’s like to fly.

Or rather, what it’s like to fall, because even if it does feel, in some way, like he always imagined flying would, when he falls from the roof of his house—he’s home for Christmas with his father, and he doesn’t really talk to anybody in his family anymore but sometimes he does steal into Karla’s room and run his fingers over red sweaters with pink hearts stitched into them—because he was watching the planes and didn’t notice how cold it had been lately and that there was ice all over the roof.

He wakes up and he’s in a hospital room and it’s like she’s floating somewhere, not flying, never flying, she’s never going to fly, she doesn’t know why the idea of flight was somehow so intoxicating when she was a child anyhow, doesn’t know why he was so enchanted by the damn lights of the planes blinking through the sky, and her family is in the room and so many of them are crying, his father is sobbing like the world is ending and it breaks Hermann’s heart.

Hermann doesn’t want to make anybody cry.

He’s never wanted to make anybody cry.

Karla’s face is wet with tears anyway, and she is wearing a soft sweater the color of a sky on a cold clear morning, and Hermine says, “I love that one,” but she doesn’t think Karla understands.

+

Hermine is eighteen years old and the doctor tells her that she will never stop shaking, and it feels like all of the rage she’s harbored for years is slowly being squeezed into her body, dispersed into every one of her bones and organs until she is _numb,_ because her body will never _ever_ stop betraying her, will it?

First she was born with this incorrectness that will never allow her to be complete in the eyes of society, and then her hip and leg shattered and a cane became part of her, an extra limb that simply set her apart from others (always apart, she’s used to it, of course she’s used to it), and now.

And now she learns that this infernal shaking is never going away, will most likely only get worse.

She has always been convinced that God meant for her to do great things, but now she thinks that He doesn’t exist, because if he does she _hates_ him for sticking her in this body, and she doesn’t think she can take hating somebody she was once certain would never disappoint her.

+

Vanessa Gerhardt is the most beautiful woman that Hermann has ever met, tall with dark skin and a body that seems to have been sculpted by some kind of aesthetic genius, and that’s not even really the point.

Yes, she is _physically_ the most beautiful woman that Hermann has ever met, but in personality…Hermann has never met a woman so utterly enchanting, has never met a human being who even vaguely seemed to like him and exist on such a higher plane.

He is certain that this is simple infatuation, but for the first time in his life he allows himself to be carried away, especially because it seems like she is infatuated with him _back_.

They _dance,_ Hermann actually dances with Vanessa and it doesn’t hurt, not really, doesn’t make him feel like his body is vastly inferior to hers though it is, they shuffle around and Hermann _laughs_ because Vanessa does and she’s not laughing at him, she’s just laughing because she can’t dance either and together they’re a disaster.

_But it doesn’t mean we’re broken, see?_ Vanessa whispers, and Hermann doesn’t cry even though tears prick at the corners of his eyes. He is so incredibly happy that he absolutely certain that it will have to stop soon, because even when he feels like a woman he is able to deal with it with grace, without worrying, without feeling as though he is an absolute freak.

So he tells her, when she says that she thinks she’s fallen in love with him (she smiles when she says it too, like it’s a good thing, like it’s not something that should make her stomach sink and her eyes fill with angry tears because loving Hermann is not a good idea, he is certain of this, he is _certain_ of this), he tells her that sometimes he’s a woman with a certain defeated triumph clear in his voice, because this is the point where she will leave.

This is the end. Vanessa is a good woman but she is not perfect for him—nobody’s really perfect for each other, in the end, and there’s always something that breaks them apart—but she embraces him and though she cries when he pushes her away because her arms feel like _too much_ around him right now, she says, _You absolute asshole, way to not tell me, way to think I was just gonna stop loving you just ‘cause you’re not…I don’t know, Hermann, it’s okay, I love you, I love you, I love you. I’ve never…I’ve never done this before, but…Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, you dick, I love you, I don’t care, I love you._

It doesn’t make any sense but he knows that she means it, and he’s not entirely sure what it is she means but it’s something, and it absolutely floors him, the fact that she doesn’t leave when he realizes that he is…

(He’s looked it up, of course. Transgender, but he’s never really been able to admit it even to himself, it’s always sounded so clinical to him.

Like it's just another disability.)

+

They don’t talk about it for a long time, but then Hermine is twenty-one and Vanessa asks if she ever wants to wear something other than Hermann’s clothes, and Hermine doesn’t cry but it’s a near thing, because she still likes dresses and skirts and she still wants to be pretty, and she still tries so hard not to be, tries so hard not to be pretty _or_ handsome, tries so hard to simply blend into her world of mathematics and keep herself away from her own body, which is such a burden to her.

Vanessa starts it, she goes out and she buys just a few small things, a few dresses that are Hermine’s size, a few skirts, a few pretty sweaters.

There’s one that’s that intoxicating sky blue color, and Hermine loves it but she can’t wear it, can’t even look at it, because it reminds her of that day in the hospital.

Hermine, for the first time in years, actually puts on a black skirt that falls just under her knees and a soft red sweater that feels nice against her skin, and Vanessa buys her a bra that makes it seem like she has _something_ of a chest, and she looks at herself for hours, her with her awkward haircut, a man dressed in woman’s clothes leaning on an ugly cane, and she _sobs_ because she will never look right and she hates herself and she hates how she looks even though it _feels_ right, she knows that when she goes out she will always look like an impostor and that’s why she’ll never go out like this.

Vanessa kisses away the tears and says, _Darling, darling, darling, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen._

And a few days later, Hermine has another day when she feels like a woman and she tries again and it feels right again, and this time…

This time she really does feel beautiful, like Vanessa isn’t just saying things to make her feel better.

This time Vanessa coaxes her out and people look at them strangely and Hermine wonders why and Vanessa giggles and says that it’s just because people just tend to _look_ more when they see lesbian couples, and Hermine smiles.

+

The Kaiju make landfall and Hermann is absolutely awestruck by those creatures, and he is terrified.

He has to do something, he tells Vanessa. They’re going to come back, he’s sure of it, after Trespasser, and they do, and this is what he’s been waiting for his whole life.

_A chance to save the world?_ Vanessa says.

_Exactly._

They elope without much fanfare just before Hermann heads off with his father to create something, anything that will stop the Kaiju in their tracks.

Their wedding photographs show two women, Vanessa in an egg-white dress and Hermine in black, and they are very happy.

Hermann doesn’t show the photographs to his family.

+

Hermann finds himself obsessed with the Jaegers, which he sometimes thinks of as his, when he’s feeling particularly selfish. He spends months poring over lines of code, watching his creations being welded together, sketching blueprints and swearing whenever he gets overexcited and the shaking in his hands becomes so heavy that his lines wobble so badly his plans are impossible to make out.

The Jaegers are everything to Hermann. Humans almost don’t exist.

Almost.

Except for Vanessa, who listens to him go on and on about the robots and the Turing test and the Kaiju, and Newton Geiszler.

Dr. Geiszler is the most brilliant man Hermann has ever met, and Hermann’s never even really met him.

They have fascinating exchanges, occasionally heated ones, and Hermann thinks that perhaps he has made a friend. His handwriting tap dances on the line of illegibility, and Geiszler (“call me Newt”, no thank you) never once comments, though he does comment on the photographs he finds of Hermann online and the kind of pens he uses to write his letters and the fact that they’re writing letters at all, when there are simpler ways to communicate.

Hermann doesn’t write that he likes letters because he doesn’t know how much longer pens will stay easily in his hands, and he wants to savor what he has left of his motor functions.

Hermann doesn’t mention, not even on days when he is Hermine but can’t change into correct clothing and she feels like she’s going to start to cry any second now because her gender is so stubborn that it won’t fit her body as it should, that he is not a man, that he is what they call, on the internet, “non-binary”.

(He likes the word. There’s something clinical about it that doesn’t feel like doctor speak, more like machine speak, and he will take talk of machines over talk of medicine any day.)

It doesn’t really matter, anyway. Chances are he’ll never meet Newton Geiszler in person, even though to tell the truth he knows it’s more likely that he will, considering that they are top in their fields and the Kaiju keep coming.

And besides, isn’t he getting a bit old to play dress-up?

+

She wants to crawl out of her skin already, the day that Adam Casey dies.

She never met the man, but she doubles over and vomits when she hears about the aneurysm.

Her father walks out of the room they were in together, because together is clearly not something that they were ever meant to be.

Her fault, it’s her fault.

It doesn’t work, doesn’t work, doesn’t work, and she goes to her room and clips at her hair until it’s ugly enough for her to breathe.

She looks at herself in the mirror.

She looks like a man.

She tries her best not to cry, and doesn’t quite succeed.

When drifting is discovered, she writes up an equation for compatibility in three days and forgets to sleep, let alone eat or change or shower.

It’s worth it.

She just wants people to stop dying in terrible ways, just for a while at least.

+

As expected, Hermann meets Newton Geiszler.

He’s not sure what he expected, isn’t even sure if what he expected isn’t what he got after all.

They don’t get along.

They barely do in writing; it makes sense that they don’t in closed spaces as well.

Marshal Pentecost watches them fight about what will do more good when it comes to fighting Kaiju, Newton’s dissections or Hermann’s predictive modeling, in English and then in German and then in English again when it becomes clear that Hermann slips into his native dialect when excited and Newton barely understands Bavarian German with an unreadable look, and in the end he just says, “Try to get some work done, gentlemen.”

They do.

They’re in different labs, and that’s their saving grace. Hermann barely interacts with his lab techs, and outside of them doesn’t interact with anybody but Newton and little Mako Mori, who wanders into his lab one day and eventually starts coming in every day at four and leaving at six.

Hermann fights with Newton, and barely speaks to Mako.

Things are alright.

+

Hermine and her father are often separated by continents, stuck in completely different Shatterdomes. Hermine supposes that it’s because it’s clear that they don’t get on, but then, neither do her and Newton, and they’re always in the same Shatterdome.

In any case, Hermine is glad he isn’t around when the Jaegers start falling, when Yancy Becket dies and Newton tries to keep from screaming by biting into his own wrist and only succeeds in making muffled, agonized sounds and himself bleed.

Hermine doesn’t answer her father’s phone calls, instead she manages to stem Newton’s bleeding and put him to bed and then she goes to her room because she feels like she’s being turned inside out, feels like she’s broken and sparking at all the edges, feels like if she stays dressed like this, like the sensible professor she so wanted to be at one point in time, she will unravel and she really won’t be able to deal with any of this when she has to be the strong one, because lately the stress has been getting to Newton and he’s falling apart, and she does something she hasn’t in ages and digs out her tiny suitcase of clothing that, in a perfect world, she wouldn’t have thought twice about putting on today.

She shrugs on her bra and a soft light brown sweater, her black skirt that falls loosely just around her knees, and she tries her best to fix her hair so that when she looks at her face she is reminded of being a child, feeling that giddy rush when she realized that she _looked right._

She falls asleep without changing because she’s exhausted, and in the morning Newton barges into her room—something that he does far too much, but she lets him because it’s Newton and she’s afraid of what he’ll do if he doesn’t have her room to barge into when it’s early in the morning and he’s got nowhere to be—babbling about some discovery he’s decided he made over the night and stops short when he sees her.

She blushes fiercely and is ready to _scream,_ is ready to snarl and tell Newton that if he has anything he wants to say he ought to keep it to himself and how does he get into her room anyway and _leave,_ but he says, “You look nice.”

Hermine doesn’t understand at all.

Newton moves to sit next to her, practically vibrating with exhausted energy as he’s been doing for days, and he says, “You never told me.”

“I didn’t owe you anything,” Hermine snaps.

Newton shrugs. “Uh, what about your, y’know, pronouns?”

“They vary,” Hermine says stiffly. “I’m…” she hesitates, because even after all this time she doesn’t think she’s ever said the word out loud, “non-binary.”

“What about today?”

Newton seems oddly calm, and it calms Hermine too. “Female pronouns.”

Newton nods slowly. “Okay,” he mutters. “Okay. Cool,” he continues, with growing excitement. “This is totally cool.”

“I don’t see how,” Hermine says, bemused.

“You are…the most interesting,” Newton sighs, and Hermine is so absurdly touched because she knows what kind of compliment that is coming from this man that she blurts, “Hermine.”

“Huh?”

“My _name._ When I have…female days. Hermine.”

“Hermine,” Newton repeats slowly. “It’s pretty.”

A smile ghosts lightly over Hermine’s face. “I think so.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hermann/Hermine in this fic is meant to have been diagnosed with Essential tremor.


End file.
